Letter to the Editor: Logging is Healthy for Forests

By PAUL YOUNGSt. George

Dear Editor,

In January 2001 in one of the last acts President Bill Clinton designated nearly 60 million acres of national forests lands off limits for logging and off limits to new road construction. Clinton's action reversed decades of federal land management of our beautiful forests.

As environmentalist icon Gifford Pinchot their first director of the US forest service wrote in a speech he prepared for Teddy Roosevelt in 1901, "Forest protection is not an end in itself, it is a means to increase and sustain the resources of our country and industries which we depend on them.'

Up to that date our forests were beautiful, being managed, and produced a renewable resource, lumber. And livestock grazing to control under growth, then working rules and regulations came into place along with managing the Wilderness and Endangered Species Act that were passed in September 1976. These two acts provided the tools in the hands of the various environmental groups and their frivolous appeals have decidedly turned the heads or tied the hands of many of those persons that were put into place to manage our forests and our deserts.

The environmentalists do not believe in making our forests become providers of natural resources. An consequently because of their ignorance on how to manage forests, ours have sunk to a level of degradation. In some forests, even lower.

How sad. The forests in France, Belgium, Germany, Norway and Finland have been producing lumber since the time of Charlemagne the Great of 742-814 A.D. still removing old growth trees, sustaining old growth trees and thinning out old growth trees to make room for young trees to become old growth trees.

The environmentalists in the United States cannot see the reality of their nearsighted actions. They do not want even the dead trees removed. How stupid.